Episode 2 | Maybe Don’t (with Kendall Miller)

Our guest today, Kendall Miller loves Hawaiian shirts biking across Colorado and connecting folks with Intek. We're very excited to hear from him about how to get the right kind of attention for people in tech that may or may not include a company called Clouley. You'll hear more about that in a minute. All right, well welcome back to Velocity. We've got a very special guest with us today. I just realized I don't know your last name. Miller. Can you just run with that? Can we just keep going? We'll just say Kendall. If you put the in front of it. I think you're just mononomic at this point in your life like Prince or Madonna. Anyway, someone who is a long time friend of Emily's, someone I'm meeting for I think the second time. But if it sounds right, I have nothing but good things to say about you. I have terrible things to think about you, but I'm going to say the good ones. Anyway, we're thrilled to have Kendall on the show. Kendall is a, well, how would you describe yourself Kendall? Give me the elevator pitch for Kendall Miller. I'm a bubbly business guy. Often I am the pretty face of the company if I can be. I mean, who wouldn't want this as their pretty face? You call yourself the chief extrovert at companies. Is that still the case? I have had that title once. I no longer have that title, but I did really like that. I love that title. It was pretty good. So Kendall is what I would deem a connector. I think your great gift is you are extremely social. You're able to kind of find people and find that sort of magic thing about them and connect them with a bunch of other folks. Kendall runs a lot of like the tech meetups in Denver and Beon. Bringing people around together. Getting people in the same room, connecting people, yeah, those are things that I'm passionate about. It has some business implications too, which is good. But yeah, that's what gets me excited. Well, let's talk about business implications. Yeah. Well, where do you want to talk about business? I mean, that's, that's, that's, feel like that's what this podcast is supposed to be all about. All right. I have a LinkedIn post in front of me that I'm going to use to queue up our discussion today. It's from our good friend Tom went worth at incident.io and it's about Cluelie. Have you heard anything about this startup Cluelie that's been making a lot of waves on social media recently? Not and I'm trying not to say I'm Cluelie lists, but my understanding is the less you know about it, probably, you know, the healthier you are. Been described as mid. Yeah. So yeah, the product is straight up mid according to Tom in this post. But the best I understand it, this is a product that was started by a guy who I think was, he was kicked out of Columbia or whatever university he was at. It's like a 19 or 20 year old kid because he was going to these big tech companies and he was interviewing using some AI tool. He'd written that allowed him to cheat right to the interviewer's faces. Right? Beautiful. So after getting kicked out of his university and having his interviews or offers or whatever rescinded for doing that, he decided he would take this, make it a product and he would lean into the whole cheating thing, right? So cheat in your whole life. Okay, so this is the guy that was doing the use AI to cheat on your. Correct. Okay, so I have heard of this guy. I didn't know he started a company. Keep going. So there you go. So this is kind of how that like viral marketing, I think that's where it gets you. Like, oh, I've heard of that guy. Yeah. I still don't feel like I can properly describe what the product does. But what Tom is saying about it is he says the product is straight up mid, but the marketing is dot, dot, dot, interesting. They dominate Instagram and TikTok by paying hundreds of creators and interns to create quote unquote viral content that has very little to do with their business. That's why we don't know what Clueley does. Also, they are relentless creators are required to post four plus times a day. He says they're the closest to running the Mr. Beast playbook I've seen in tech seems to be working as they are close to 10 million ARR. Now to be fair, the way ARR seems to be getting calculated in tech today is like we made $5 this minute. So you know, I ever sell that's 100 million ARR. Yeah. So anyway, but he's saying, would this work and be to be sad? So my crazy for even think about their playbook and the picture he has associated with the post is a picture of a billboard that Clueley is running in Times Square, which is just a white background. And then in lower case like Ariel font, it says, hi, I'm Roy. I'm 21. This was very expensive. Please buy my thing. Clueley.com. Wait, is that real? I thought that was a joke. No, that is actually what they paid to put in Times Square. Please buy my thing. That's, I mean, sorry, PLS buy my thing. PLS, yeah. Well, oh man, I have so many thoughts about this. Would this work and be to be sad? So first of all, it's a depressingly large percentage of people, particularly in marketing leadership, are still driven by like, well, what does the playbook say? Let's just go do that. Who cares what the results are? Oh, we paid $5,000. 10,000 people showed up to this webinar. Are all of them some other country? Are all of them bots? Do we care? We got 10,000 leads. That's what we paid for. Like, there's so much just follow the rulebook that in marketing, if you have the decent, like the smallest piece of humanity and just like, what would people think is interesting? Like, you're already stand out and that's like weird, right? Like, this person said a thing that I can relate to. I mean, you see this and you're like, it's kind of funny. And like, how much marketing is kind of funny? Like the vast majority of it just isn't, right? But then, I mean, I'm actually stuck on something that came up earlier, which is that the product is mid. And I think that I'm going to take issue with that entire premise, which is the assumption that good products win, because that is not my experience at all. Agreed. I mean, there's a reason, hashtag Microsoft is still very much in business. And I'm sorry, I know you guys have some personal connections there. Maybe I can't say that. But there's some very big companies who have produced some very mediocre products for years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years. And like, what differentiates them is their product better? No. But is it easy to use? No. But is it pretty? No. But is it like, literally, we can sell. And that's the only thing that matters, right? Like, in business, you have two problems, sales and every other problem. And if you can figure out how to sell, it doesn't matter if it's the world's most mid product. And so the marketing being interesting, like him saying, product very mid, but the marketing is interesting is sort of like, okay, we have a business, right? How many companies have the most incredible products ever? How many products is Google release that are the best product ever that solves no one's problem? And they learned how to sell it to no one, right? Yeah. So I mean, I'm caught up on a lot of things there. But that's where my first reaction goes is like, who cares if it's a mid product? Also, making interesting marketing is like, actually a pretty fucking low bar. Can I say, can I allowed to curse at you? Yeah. Hello. This is my podcast. Thank you. I'm curious to what your thoughts on PLG are then, because I'm very interested in the fact that a lot of people do sort of lean on, you know, if we build the best product in the world, then the marketing doesn't matter. And I couldn't disagree more. Everything matters, marketing absolutely matters, how you package, how you message. Do you think you can overcome that or is marketing always going to be part of the conversation? Well, so the thing is, is if you make a compelling enough product that's really easy to use, that's really easy to sign up for, that's really a fun experience so that people are talking about it. It's marketing itself. That's all that PLG is, is like a product that's so not shitty. It actually does some of its own marketing. Like, the vast majority of products are just like, I mean, think of your life and how many products in your life you're delighted to use today. Like, if you strain, you might think of one. You're right. Right? Like, I mean, it's it's hard. And there's times where like, there was a long time where I thought Slack was the most delightful product I'd ever used. Like, I couldn't believe how fast it was, how smooth it was, how easy it was, how nicely it worked, how everything was in this one. So, and now Slack is just a shit show. It's just a mega enterprise. And I'm just going to shit on a lot of products in this podcast. But like, it's, you know, it's not a product that delights anymore. And when you create a product that delights, yeah, it leads to, that's, that is marketing. But I would so I would argue that if you create a product that delights, it's because the product is very specific and very opinionated. And so it's small. I would say that Slack, one of the things that maybe they've lost a little bit is as they've added other features, they've become a lot more in line with other kinds of chat tools, enterprise level. But what you're thinking of, there's none that get made fun of regularly on social media. And I can think of that are bad for games too. You think it's in a very, very, very complex. I'm cough, cough teams. But yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do think it became enterprisey when they got some, it's my understanding that I know which large enterprise client, but I won't say because I was probably not true. But you know, they get one big enterprise client that says, Hey, we need this to change in this, this in this way. And it's so much money you can't say, no, which don't give you wrong. If you're in those shoes and somebody offers you that much money, you go build a shittier product to meet that one client's needs. Like because #business, we're, you know, on the edges of capitalism here. But like, I think, and this is going one other place that, I'm sorry, I'm just like going, but I heard a talk at scale a couple of years ago, where a guy was talking about the first Xbox that was built. Okay. And he gives an example of building the Xbox and how much fun it was and how much that translated to like a good user experience, at least in the very early versions. And I don't game at all. So I have no idea if it's fun to use now. But by contrast, he talks about the screens on the back of airplane seats and how awful they are to use. And he says that the delight in using a product is directly tied to the delight in building the product. And I do think that when you design by committee, nobody's having any fun. Everybody's just like, well, we all agree that this one's not shitty. So we're going to go with that and you get the worst logo ever and the worst, you know, mantra ever and the worst. Like, I'm building things right now that people have reacted to. And I'm like, guys, I'm not going to design by committee. Like, I'm just not interested in that. But if you're building something you're passionate about, you care about, it's not designed by committee. It's you. It's you. It's your passion. And I think it shows through in the product totally. So just to reel this back in a little bit though, let's say I'm a marketer, right? Yep. Whether the product team is having fun building the product or not doesn't really affect the job that I have to go and sell the product, unfortunately. Like, I was hired six months ago. The product is what it is. You know, it sounds like we're saying that maybe not all attention is created equal in terms of, you know, people that are looking at the product and having something to say about it good or bad. How do you approach going out and getting attention for these products that may be mid, right? You've been handed a basket of product features that you really didn't choose. So, gosh, when I'm in that situation, so like, I mean, I play business guy at early stage startups most of the time. And so in that situation, I'm playing product guy as well as marketing guy as well as, you know, all these different things. And and some of that is like the first thing that I do in almost any startup I come into is just reach out to anybody in my network who I think this is relevant to and say, would you give me advice, right? Like, if I say, hey, well, you come by my product, they're going to say, fuck no, Kendall, like, sorry, like, right? But if you say, hey, can you give me some advice? People love giving advice, right? They'll always get on the phone and give you advice. And hey, would you look at this, tell me what you think, tell me how it needs to improve. And if you listen to their words, you start to figure out what is some of the marketing. Like, because a lot of times, and it's really hard in your founder, I'm founding something right now, it's really hard in your founder to see it objectively. You're like, this is the problem it solves. People are like, I don't care about that problem. I want to solve this problem over here. And unless you're able to hear that, which sometimes it takes another person, right? Like, that's part of the thing that a product person brings or that I bring in it when I'm within a really stage startup is just a different ear. And like, it's not my baby. You can tell me it's ugly. I don't care. Like, if we need to sell this baby over here, that's a terrible analogy. It's really bad. And I really dislike it. But, but you get my idea. Like, the, you know, if we need to change the baby, still not happy. Like, go to baby. I feel like there's a better analogy. But anyways, yeah, like, like, go to the baby. Don't like that either. Emily, you know, I can hear that. I can come back and say, Hey, here's, here's what they're actually saying. Here's where that needs to go. And like, then part of the product team's job and part of what products historically bad at is then motivating people for the why, right? If you just say, Hey, the next feature we're building is this. That's a lot harder for people to grasp than like, Hey, this is what excites customers. And here's why it excites customers. Let's go build this thing that excites customers. Like, look at the problem we're actually solving. Product teams are usually actually interested in that. But if you just say the next feature blue button instead of red button and a little farther that way, you know, everybody's like, you fucking kidding me. It's the worst. So am I correct in understanding you that you believe part of your job as product marketing is to inform the product team on how they should be improving and listening, being that voice of the customer for that team. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't think I would almost ever call myself a product marketer, but I end up playing that role. Yeah. I mean, it just ended up playing any of the business roles. But yes, it's in that early stage company. And in any time, I mean, it doesn't matter if it's late stage company. It's still the same thing. Like, what is the customer saying back to me? How do I interpret that into what needs to get built? And then not just communicate, this is what's next, right? But the why the problem it's solving, etc, it does motivate people differently. And they're much more likely to go to their friend and say, check out how I solve this problem. If they understand what the problem is, rather than Emily, that blue button's mine, right? Like, I mean, they're not going to be excited about that. And so it does translate into the user experience. And I think when it comes to Clually, like, it's probably, you know, it doesn't matter how much attention they're getting on the product. If the product isn't meeting that need or solving the problem, or, you know, no one's passionate about it. Right. It's going to be a lot of marketing doesn't matter. Yeah. Well, and I'm curious. I mean, I just, you brought up this post and I just immediately went into a long rant. What picture interest about it? You know, I think it was Tom's question at the end where he's saying, hey, like, I see people trying tricks like this kind of on the consumer side, on the B to C side. I imagine, although Tom is seeing Clually specifically, he's probably also thinking about five other influencers that he sees on TikTok or Instagram talking about this brand of shoes or bottle water or whatever and thinking, hey, I'm doing marketing for a dev tool. Right. What should I be learning from these people? What should I say? Okay, whether or not that's working for them, it's not something I should try. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of back to the B2B SaaS. Would this work for B2B SaaS? Problem. And I guess we didn't quite address that. So I mean, I think like, how do I say this? Companies start off sometimes edgy when they're small, right? Because you can push the boundaries. You don't have the big enterprise customer. You're not going to offend anybody or you're going to offend people, but it's going to win you a couple people. But all marketing is kind of edgy. If it's not a little bit edgy, it doesn't get anywhere. If it's just bland as heck, and I say as heck on purpose, like each star CK heck, if it's bland as heck, then it's just not going to go anywhere. Nobody's going to see it. Nobody's going to remember it, right? Like which the number one thing we got to have them do is remember it. Even if they hate it, at least they remembered it. So you're saying, if I go down the escalator in an airport and I see a billboard in front of me that says leverage transformative innovation and as a picture of a guy in a suit, and you know it was. So isn't that working in its own way? How many, how many big companies in the chat? I'm sorry, yes, I'm going to work through my top 10. Yeah, no, I mean, you're going to even if you like, and that's an interesting message I would really like to be leveraging whatever the fuck it was you just said I already forgot. But you're going to get down to the bottom of the escalator and you're going to be like, I need to totally go leverage innovation. Who do I call? But the so I think these are marketing teams in all honesty. These are marketing teams with big budgets with very little creative control or flexibility. Yes, 100%. And they just throw money at things that don't actually have the need to. Well, and having the billboard at the bottom of the escalator was one of their okay hours. Yes, exactly. And they're just they're literally checking the box. It doesn't matter what goes on. So it's a nasty slurry of like perverse and negative incentives all. Sure. Combining to make the thing that no one actually likes or wants to see, right, which is so unfortunate. But so if a company can, it like the the the reason he's asking could this work and be to be sass is what he means is if the company's sufficiently large could should this work. Yes. And the answer is it doesn't because if it's sufficiently large, suddenly you have designed by committee at some point the CEO has been like, whoa, I don't like that messaging. Why are we doing that? Yeah. Right? Or somebody's come over the top and been like, Hey, this one guy on Twitter was upset about a thing we said. Yeah, we have to stop ever doing that ever again, which is like not how business like first time founders really wrestle with the first time they get a sales email back. That's like, fuck you. Leave me the hell alone. How dare you send me this cold email? And they're like, Oh my God, what are we doing? We're like you didn't sales. Yeah. Nose happen really angry nose from some very particular, I bet this guy's bald and has a ponytail and runs Linux on the desktop. Some of those people are wonderful people. Some of them I'm I'm painting a lot of stereotypes here. But you know, that that's the stereotype of the like, fuck you, how dare you email me? Yeah, which like, sorry, no, I would like to point out for all of our bald and ponytail listeners that Kendall is wearing something very close to Berk and Starks under the table right now. Can you stand in my wife, Mayor, may not have almost left me when I first put these keens on. And also, I'm very close to bald and I would really grow a ponytail if I could. I tried like a two years ago during COVID. It's just got really long on the sides and it was really, really, really bad. So I stopped. I think that's the point of it though. Like it's not going to be good. There's no success mode. No, no, I'm with you, but there's some stages I had to go through. I didn't think I could get through. You touch, yeah, yeah. And to be clear, I run a network of CTOs. You want to talk about the overlap between bald ponytail, wearing men and CTOs. Like we're the closest to a full circle in that Venn diagram. Yes. So you touched on something that I love because I think it's the secret sauce of influencer marketing. And that's that the company has to be very particular and careful with how they message and what that kind of like brand message should be across all of their marketing. Influencers do not have that kind of chokehold on it, right? And so you have this really sort of off by one voice where they're taking that brand messaging there, injecting what you actually want them to talk about. But they get to put it in their own words with their own flavor for their audience. And I think that's like the big benefit of it. Well, yes, like wandering. What's that long? You're laundering. Yeah. Why do influencer marketers have to exist? Like literally the only reason they exist is because a company can't have a personality. Yes, exactly. I mean, there's a reason why Wendy's on Twitter is huge or whatever it's called now. But right? Like, like, there's a couple of these brainwriters. It's still called a big Mac on Twitter. That's good. That's good. But, you know, like if a company does that, they become well known. People follow those accounts because they're interested in them. Right? But because Microsoft can't tweet something interesting to save their lives. I know. They definitely aren't posting anything on LinkedIn that's super interesting. You have to, you have to cause this where I say Freeman and Forrest. Freeman and Forrest. Look directly into the camera. Oh, yeah. Sorry. You use Freeman and Forrest. There was that better. But yeah, I mean, that's like literally the only reason influencer marketing exists is because company marketing can't do the same thing. I think you're absolutely. Yeah. Can I as as we sort of come to a close, I two questions I have. What is the transition between sort of being this kind of business role for a bunch of startups and the founder? Are you like, are you able to take your own advice and apply it? Are you like, are there any kind of hiccups that you're running into? What does that experience been like? Yeah. So I'm really, really good at giving other people advice and really, really bad at taking my own advice. Yeah. I mean, I was on a call last week with a guy who just ripped this new product I'm building apart. And what was devastating was not the holes he found. Those are useful for me to know what was devastating was knowing I would have seen these holes in anybody else's product immediately. And I cannot see them in myself. And it's actually like, I'm raising venture right now in the VCs. Ask me a lot like kind of why now what what what do you do? Why are you thinking about doing this? Yeah. And my answer is like, I'm sick of watching other people make mistakes. Like I'm going to make mistakes. I just want them to be kind of shaped. And like I'm just I'm just kind of tired of just standing by and watching mistake after mistake after mistake while I'm in the background going, we don't have to fail this way. Yeah. And don't get me wrong. It's not like I'm infallible. But you know, when I watch soccer, if they would just do what I tell them, we would win. And it's the same thing in in consulting. Like if you just listen, you'd be fine. Yeah. Like, why did you fail? Because you didn't listen to everything I said. You know, why are we at 3 million? Is that a 20 million AR? Or you didn't listen to everything? What is the company you're founding? What's it called? So the company I'm starting is called Maybe Don't AI. That's Maybe Don't comma AI. It was something. Something needs to say to the AI. Maybe don't do that. So the story I tell and I'll give you the real brief pitch is if I'm backing out of my driveway and I turn to my 15-year-old son and I say, Hey, I just realized the place we're going only accepts cash. Go in the house. Don't come out until you have cash. Well, he has authority to go in the house. He has permission to go through every drawer. He goes in the house. He digs around. He can't find cash. And he goes, but dad says I'm not supposed to get back in the car without cash. So he grabs mom's engagement ring. He runs in the pawn shop and he jumps in the car and he says, Here's to grandad. That's how AI agents act today. That's what Maybe Don't need to say. Maybe Don't do that. So we're building a non-deterministic policy engine to keep AI agents from acting that way. I love it. That's a great pitch. Well done. Fantastic. Well, Kendall Miller. It's been wonderful having you on the five years. He's a forest brazil. Oh man. That was not even close. I just know I had it wrong, but I also was sure I wasn't going to get it right. So I just went. You're just leaning for it. Much like an AI agent, right? Yeah, that's right. Well, it's been so wonderful having you on. Thank you for sharing some of your wisdom with us. Everyone, please make sure to check out Maybe Don't AI. Maybe do check it out. Well, thanks once again for joining us. I have been forest brazil. This is Emily Freeman. My co-founder at Freeman and Forest. Our thanks to Britain, Noel and Tyler Freeman are wonderful producers on this episode. As always, it really, really helps us. If you like, share, subscribe. However, you engage with your podcast. Tell your friends. And if you have something you want us to talk about, like let us know. You know, tweet at us. Tell us what we need to talk about on the next episode. Thank you.